Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Ted Cruz in Madison and more political news and opinion

Ted Cruz in Madison

I skipped Physical Therapy Wednesday morning, and Bonnie and I attended a "Women for Ted Cruz" Rally here in Madison, though there were as man men as women. It was unusual in that Ted's Mom, his wife Heidi, and Carly Fiorina did more talking than Sen. Cruz. Heidi is very impressive. as a child, she was the daughter of missionaries in Africa, and went into finance because she saw that so many people in the Third World were destitute as no one could obtain capital to start factories or small business. She stressed how corruption, and the lack of enforcement of contract and property rights in those countries' courts made it especially risky to start a business that gave people jobs, and is worried the same thing is happening to us. Bonnie was impressed with Ted saying that "All issues are women's issues. Women are a majority in America, and security and constitutional freedoms mean as much to them as men." We had third row seats, so heard everything okay. I was interviewed by a reporter for the New York Times and Bonnie and I were both interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio. There were a lot of college-age kids. We wish we'd thought to take Britnye out of school to go. ~Bob

Book Recommendation: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. By A. J. Pollard

I read this well balanced, well written biography on my Kindle, but a used copy is at least as inexpensive. Pollard does a fine job of laying out the known facts and possible interpretations, separating them from both the speculation and the propaganda of supporters of both Richard and Henry. I think both Ricardians and anti-Ricardians will develop a fully understanding of the case for and against Richard. Pollard has written many histories of the War of the Roses era, and I look forward to reading others. ~Bob

Excerpt: Less than a week before Wisconsin's presidential primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has leaped ahead of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has an edge over Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Marquette Law School Poll. Cruz received support from 40 percent of likely Republican voters, Trump got 30 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich trailed with 21 percent support.

Excerpt: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) did not get a chance to debate Donald Trump one-on-one during CNN’s town hall programming Tuesday night, but he may have gotten something more valuable, namely a chance to show a more earnest, conversational and emotional side of himself that too often is hidden under a stagy rhetorical cadence.

Most newsworthy, Cruz refused to say that he would endorse Trump if he got the Republican presidential nomination. He explained that he is not in the “habit” of backing people who attack his wife and family. That, he said, is “beyond the pale.” Pressed to answer definitively, he said he would solve the problem by making certain that Trump was not the nominee. (In his own segment, Trump walked away from his pledge, making clear just how foolish Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has been in soliciting Trump and refusing to criticize his outrageous rhetoric.)

Donald Trump Fabricated A Near-Death Experience, Three Biographies Say. “I can get some publicity out of this,” Trump is alleged to have said after three of his executives died in a helicopter accident.

Excerpt: Donald Trump's campaign has paid more than $1.2 million to a small Colorado printing firm connected to a Republican operative who ran a short-lived super PAC in support of Trump — shelling out $624,000 to the company just last month, new filings show. That made WizBang Solutions, where GOP operative Mike Ciletti works as a director, the campaign's third-highest paid vendor in February. The Commerce City-based company — which was paid for printing and design services — collected more from the Trump campaign last month than it had in all previous months combined.

Trump Is ‘Completely Uneducated About Any Part of the World’: Andrea Mitchell Blasts Trump During Segment on ‘Meet the Press’

Excerpt: The predictable bewilderment and outrage are professed. But absent from all these ashen-faced accounts is any examination of the people who put Trump in a position to run for president in the first place. The man didn’t emerge, all at once and fully formed, from some hidden and benighted hollow in the American psyche. He’s been kicking around for 30 years or more, and he was promoted and schooled, made famous and made wealthy, by the same culture and economy that now reviles him, and finds his success so vexing. After all, it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The WestboroBaptistChurch didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo. (My only quibble with his list would beSpy, which clearly and repeatedly argued that Donald Trump was the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with Manhattan’s high society/super-wealthy class in the 1980s. From the perspective of a lot of folks on the right at the time,Spyoffered a group of smug New York elites snickering and mocking other smug New York elites (and anyone not sophisticated enough to know who they were talking about). But from the perspective of today, the magazine’s ridicule represented the white blood cells of a functioning societal body, pointing out the extraordinary sense of entitlement, hypocrisy, shamelessness, egomania, greed, and Bacchanalian excess going on among the city’s elites. At its best, the magazine represented a bit of cultural vigilantism, exposing bad behavior and holding it up for ridicule and scorn that it was unlikely to get from other fawning media outlets. --Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt)

Excerpt: Donald Trump has a simple formula for smearing his opponents and pushing his desired outcomes. Step one: Find or create a baseless rumor and/or make a vague, thinly veiled threat. Step two: Tweet the rumor, attributing it to a nameless source (e.g., “People are saying . . . ”), or tweet the threat, sometimes — in mob-boss fashion — framing it as a consequence beyond his control. Step three: Assume — correctly — that the media will weave it into their election-season narrative. We’ve seen Trump use this technique effectively, most recently to retaliate against an anti-Trump super-PAC ad featuring a risqué modeling shot of his wife, Melania, by threatening to “spill the beans” about Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi.

Excerpt: It is reflective of the dishonesty, arrogance and misogyny that infects Donald Trump’s campaign that his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has now been charged with battery against reporter Michelle Fields. The Post reports: “The campaign manager for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump was charged with battery by police in Florida on Tuesday for allegedly grabbing and yanking the arm of a Breitbart News reporter who was trying to ask Trump a question.” Rather than apologize, recognizing the audio and video evidence against him, plus the eyewitness account of Post reporter Ben Terris, Lewandowski and his boss denied the incident occurred and smeared Fields. Now another video of the incident has surfaced, yet Trump and his right-hand man still deny the incident occurred.

He can barely complete a sentence, has three or four bankruptcies under his belt, but he can fix the world, all alone I might add. The military will just be background scenery for the magnificent Donald J Trump: ‘I alone can solve’ problem of radical Islam, Donald Trump says ..One twitter responder — among the more printable and substantive ones — suggested that he fly to Pakistan right away and do so, while another noted on Easter Sunday, in all-caps, that “you are not Christ.”… --Nanette

Excerpt: The Louisiana delegate picture isn’t evidence of anything untoward. Trump and Cruz both won 18 delegates on election night. Marco Rubio, since dropped out, won five, and another five are uncommitted. The Cruz campaign has done the nitty-gritty work to see that those delegates are likely Cruz supporters. The only scandal here is that the Cruz campaign, built on grass-roots organizing muscle, knows the process and is working hard for every advantage. Trump’s plaint is a little like showing up at a cricket match and crying foul because the opposing team knows the rules and all you know is that you swing a bat.

Excerpt: Mrs. Clinton did not set out to damage national security and compromise defense secrets, although she obviously had no compunction about doing so as necessary to serve her higher personal interests. For a generation, she has been a public person whose most intimate companion has been scandal. She knew her State Department stewardship would be no different. Her motive in designing a communication system that circumvented government recordkeeping and disclosure laws was to avoid a day of reckoning as she campaigned in 2016 for the power of the presidency she craves. And that is where Loretta Lynch comes in. That would be the same Loretta Lynch who came to prominence in 1999 by being appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York by none other than Mrs. Clinton’s husband.

Excerpt: Alas, regular criminal-justice procedures have been suspended by the explosive politics of the Clinton investigation. The FBI is doing its professional, apolitical best to investigate the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. The high stakes rattle not only the Clinton campaign but also the Democratic administration in which Mrs. Clinton worked when she engaged in the work-related conduct being investigated. On the one hand, the Obama administration does not want to be seen by the public as obstructing the FBI; on the other hand, President Obama does not want to be seen by his base as tanking the Democrats’ best shot at retaining the White House — the likely fallout if the Obama Justice Department signals that a formal, very serious criminal investigation is underway. So Obama is hedging his bets. He is letting the FBI investigate, but on its own, without Justice Department prosecutors and the grand jury. This frees the administration and the Clinton campaign to be, by turns, ambiguous and disingenuous about whether there really is a formal investigation going on.

Excerpt: In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002. While there is no evidence that Lynch played a direct role either in the tax work done by the firm for the Clintons or in linking Hillary’s private email server to MX Logic, the ethics of the legal profession hold all partners jointly liable for the actions of other partners in a business. “If Hogan and Hartson previously represented the Clintons on tax matters, it is incumbent upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to [disclose] what, if any, role she had in such tax matters,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch.

History's most entitled presidential candidate feels entitled to censor what the public can hear about her from her opponent. Hey Hill, maybe we could just, you know, listen to the debate and decide for ourselves whether his criticisms cross the line. Or can't we be trusted with that responsibility? --Joe

Excerpt: Indeed, national polls and exit polls reveal about 70 to 80 percent of young Democrats are casting their ballots for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Yet millennials tend to reject the actual definition of socialism — government ownership of the means of production, or government running businesses. Only 32 percent of millennials favor “an economy managed by the government,” while, similar to older generations, 64 percent prefer a free-market economy. And as millennials age and begin to earn more, their socialistic ideals seem to slip away.

Excerpt: I’m a bit late to this, but during Sunshine Week earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented the 2016 Follies, the awards for the worst government abusers of open records laws. Among the winners: Hillary Clinton, Kim Davis, the state of Georgia, the city of Inglewood, the TSA, and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The U.S. Department of Defense has the dishonor of winning twice. Meanwhile, open records ninja Jason Leopold details how the Obama administration destroyed FOIA reform — a story he could only tell by way of FOIA requests, naturally.

Excerpt: Federal agents announced Monday they swept up nearly 1,000 suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, sex traffickers and murderers during a widespread five-week operation aimed at landing a punishing blow against transnational criminal gangs. The operation, dubbed Project Shadowfire, drew on cooperation between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as other state, local and federal law enforcement officers. The resulting 1,133 arrests included: 1,001 criminal arrests; 915 gang members and associates; 239 foreign nationals from 13 countries in Central America, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean; 132 immigration violations. (Perhaps regime will deem them "persecuted" and release them on US civilians again. Gangs prosecuted? Open borders let them all in nonstop; report one gang has selected DC for area HQ. --Barb)

Excerpt: Solar power is wrecking the electrical grid in the Philippines, and the blackouts are only going to get worse according to reports by power grid operators published Monday. Data from the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) showed that solar power has caused ‘stress’ on the power grid, leading to brownouts and blackouts. The data show that solar power is frying the grid by producing either too much, or too little electricity, triggering failures and blackouts in the Visayas island group of the Philippines. (Feds keep running National Ad Council ad to "be prepared for an emergency." Testing national emergency system today x2. But if there is no power......Barb)

Worth Reading: The rise of the ‘gentleman’s A’ and the GPA arms race. By Catherine Rampell

Excerpt: The waters of LakeWobegon have flooded U.S. college campuses. A’s — once reserved for recognizing excellence and distinction — are today the most commonly awarded grades in America. That’s true at both Ivy League institutions and community colleges, at huge flagship publics and tiny liberal arts schools, and in English, ethnic studies and engineering departments alike. Across the country, wherever and whatever they study, mediocre students are increasingly likely to receive supposedly superlative grades.

Excerpt: If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy.

Currently there is much indignation being expressed by Democrats because the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to hold confirmation hearings on President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The Democrats complain, and the media echo their complaint, that it is the Senate's duty to provide "advice and consent" on the President's appointment of various federal officials. Therefore, according to this claim, the Senate is neglecting its Constitutional duty by refusing even to hold hearings to determine whether the nominee is qualified, and then vote accordingly. First of all, the "advice and consent" provision of the Constitution is a restriction on the President's power, not an imposition of a duty on the Senate. It says nothing about the Senate's having a duty to hold hearings, or vote, on any Presidential nominee, whether for the Supreme Court or for any other federal institution. The power to consent is the power to refuse to consent, and for many years no hearings were held, whether the Senate consented or did not consent. Nor have Democrats hesitated, when they controlled the Senate, to refuse to hold hearings or to vote when a lame-duck President nominated someone for some position requiring Senate confirmation during a Presidential election year.

Excerpt: It’s well known how in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor to Democrat President Johnson, warned that the black family was on the verge of a “complete breakdown” because of growing illegitimacy rates: in 1963 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites was 3 percent, and for blacks it was 23.6 percent. Moynihan was part of a generation of Democrats who cared about lifting blacks up into the ranks of equal opportunity with whites, back in the days before the Democrat Party became completely morally corrupt. In his 1965 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Moynihan observed that because more blacks were being born into unmarried homes, more blacks were becoming dependent on welfare to survive. (Every time I see a Black American, a gay American, a Muslim American, any other American belonging somehow to what is supposed to be a discriminated minority group speak up for facts and reason, I thank heaven for the gift of such people to all the rest of us. Here a Black woman dares to bring up the 51 year old but totally accurate predictions of Moynihan about what was about to happen to Black families. I suppose the only "good" news is that since we now have higher rates of single young White mothers who also go into the system, with a parallel set of problems for them and their children, we can say that yes, this kind of system is actually not just bad for Blacks, it's just been bad, period. There has to be a better answer, after all, we've have 50 years of proving this doesn't work well at all. --Del)

Excerpt: Attorney General Loretta Lynch issued a nine-page letter through her civil-rights division to municipal and state judges around the United States, warning them to ease off prosecution of criminals, particularly those of minority status, or else face loss of federal funding. Specifically, she wants the 6,500 municipal level courts in the country to offer community service in lieu of jail time, or provide more “amnesty days” to those with outstanding warrants so they can pay a fee instead of serving behind bars, the New York Post reported. And the recommendation comes with a caveat: Those who fail to comply could face the same type of federal scrutiny that Ferguson, Missouri, local police and courts saw after the police shooting of a black teen.

Feds Propose to Fine Schools for Not Following Michelle's Lunch Directives

excerpt: The federal government is taking steps to fine schools that do not comply with first lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch rules. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued a proposed rule Monday to codify parts of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama. The regulation would punish schools and state departments with fines for “egregious or persistent disregard” for the lunch rules that imposed sodium and calorie limits and banned white grains. (Article says a teacher who gave out candy for rewards ended up not being fined but school had to develop a "corrective action plan." Get this--"You've done well on your report, Johnny. Have some broccoli." Blacgh~! Such is life under a command/socialist/communist government; using the money handed out by the regime to squeeze the schools and states. Doing the same to control hospitals, MDs, healthcare. Can the First Family eat this stuff, too, or just tell the peons to live on it? Think of the $$ US taxpayers would save on Kobe beef, champagne, lobsters....Barb)

Excerpt: Imagine your horror when, after you've assured your toddler night after night that there are no monsters in his room, you walk through his door and hear a stranger's voice stroking your child's innocence.That's exactly what happened to Sarah, when she walked into her toddler's bedroom and heard a predator's voice say, "Wake up little boy, daddy's looking for you."... What's worse is that without realizing it, parents are creating cyber holes for predators to slip into their children's bedrooms. (Made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. All the "voice recognition" TVs, games and remotes are holes as well--someone has to listen to decipher commands. Oh, and those "smart" appliances, security systems.....just invite big bro in. --Barb)

Excerpt: As the presidential campaign stampedes through the BadgerState, lost in the din are some key court dates in John DoeLand. Things have been mostly quiet on multiple fronts in litigation and challenges regarding Wisconsin’s infamous and unconstitutional John Doe investigation into dozens of conservative groups and the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker. But the coming days will open up a new round of revelations, including new documents released in a state lawsuit, oral arguments in the federal Cindy Archer civil rights case, and deadlines before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Excerpt: An Easter egg hunt descended into chaos on Saturday after parents in Orange, Connecticut, stormed the field. Children as young as four were trampled by adults in a rampage to steal buckets and grab as many of the 9,000 hidden eggs as possible from the third annual free event at the PEZ headquarters. One four-year-old son was left 'bloody' on the sports field and a two-year-old girl was shoved into the mud, witnesses claimed. A horrified parent described the scene as 'an angry mob of chaos' with 'not one toddler hunting for eggs' among the crowds of adults.

Excerpt: A Vietnamese court has sentenced three women who held up the flags of the defeated U.S.-backed South Vietnam to up to four years in prison on charges of spreading anti-state propaganda, media reported Wednesday.

The women were convicted of holding anti-state banners, the flags and chanting anti-state slogans outside the UnitedState diplomatic mission in Ho Chi Minh City in July 2014, Thanh Nien newspaper reported. (I am shocked and amazed that they would dare to make such a demonstration, knowing a prison sentence was sure to come for it. The communists still fear and hate the RVN flag, they always will. -Del)

Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg is as ‘nonpartisan’ as her liberal donors. By M.D. Kittle

Excerpt: Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide. After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations. As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology. The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece.

Excerpt: Americans have been killed by prisoners released from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a senior Defense Department official told lawmakers Wednesday, triggering sharp criticism from Republicans opposed to shuttering the facility in the wake of deadly attacks by the Islamic State group in Brussels and Paris.

The deadly toll of terrorism around the globe has jumped nearly 800 percent in the past five years, according to an exhaustive new report that blames the alarming expansion of Islamist groups across the Middle East and Africa. The nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism found that an average of nearly 30,000 people per year have been killed by terrorists since 2010, when terrorism's death toll was 3,284. The authors of the study, which tabulated the numbers through the end of 2015, say that the exponential increase shows two troubling trends: More attacks are happening, and they tend to be deadlier than ever. (This is Obama's legacy and Hillary's as Sec of State, both pro-Muslim Brotherhood et al. Such a religion of peace. --Barb)

European Authorities Overwhelmed As Hundreds Of ISIS Fighters Return Home

A Muslim-American man has a great message for other Muslims and the rest of us besides. He and people like him are the hope we have for this nation to do much, much better than they have in Europe. And we need everyone to appreciate that we have a lot of people like him here, far more, I believe, than the radicalized nutcases scattered around. With the help of the sane and good people of the Islamic faith, we can all do so much better for the whole nation. --Del

Excerpt: All in all, it’s just another day in Sweden, where multiculturalism is pushing the once famously liberal Nordic society to the breaking point. Mass immigration, mostly from Muslim nations, has utterly transformed many Swedish cities, leading to the development of “no-go zones” where law enforcement fears to tread. The hostility of immigrant communities toward native Europeans is so great a news crew visiting Rinkeby, Sweden, was attacked by hostile residents when they investigated the neighborhood known as “Little Mogadishu.” (The goal is to destroy Western civilization, Jews, Christians and other minorities and establish a global caliphate. Been at it for centuries, coming to a head in WWIII. --Barb)